# The Future of Software & AI | Cognition’s Scott Wu Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy. Scott Wu argues AI agents will become the human-computer interface, letting people focus on what they want to create. - Show: Founders - Hosts: [David Senra](https://realalpha.app/people/david-senra/) - Guest: [Scott Wu](https://realalpha.app/builders/scott-wu/) is co-founder and CEO of Cognition. - Published: Jun 28, 2026 - Length: 1 h 5 m ## The best minutes - [37:12](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2232) [Cognition found its first enterprise fit in repetitive migrations](https://realalpha.app/s/cognition-found-its-first-enterprise-fit-in-repetitive/) (5 min) - [20:30](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1230) [AI progress calls for first-principles thinking](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-progress-calls-for-first-principles-thinking/) (2 min) - [52:14](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3134) [Focused startups can beat companies with far more resources](https://realalpha.app/s/focused-startups-can-beat-companies-with-far-more-resources/) (5 min) ## Also worth watching - [30:13](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1813) [One real task convinced Wu that Devin’s approach could work](https://realalpha.app/s/one-real-task-convinced-wu-that-devins-approach-could-work/) (7 min) - [42:41](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2561) [Cognition put its whole team on its first enterprise customer](https://realalpha.app/s/cognition-put-its-whole-team-on-its-first-enterprise/) (5 min) - [48:31](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2911) [Measure AI spend by output, not token counts](https://realalpha.app/s/measure-ai-spend-by-output-not-token-counts/) (4 min) - [15:37](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=937) [AI could make one-off software economical](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-could-make-one-off-software-economical/) (3 min) - [23:01](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1381) [Long-running agents could pursue missions, not just tasks](https://realalpha.app/s/long-running-agents-could-pursue-missions-not-just-tasks/) (6 min) Skip the childhood and family stories, sponsor reads, the early software-interface explanation, and the acquisition and founder-motivation discussion. ## Full analysis: Scott Wu says AI work horizons grew from about 10 seconds to hours - Wu says AI tasks moved from about 10 to 20 seconds of uninterrupted work to hours. - That signals progress, but the episode gives no benchmark version, task mix or error rate. - Buyers should test completed work and integration costs before budgeting for longer agent autonomy. Its 6 sections, what it means for you and what to watch are on [the page](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/#analysis), free with an account: - [21:52](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1312) AI task horizons stretch from seconds to hours - [10:34](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=634) Devin aims to become the human-computer interface - [15:57](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=957) Agents could make one-off software economical - [39:34](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2374) Cognition found fit in repetitive migrations - [48:43](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2923) Output measures beat token counts - [52:39](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3159) Cognition's focus remains a bet, not proof ## Summary Scott Wu is co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the company behind Devin, an AI software engineer. The YouTube description says Wu won three gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics and placed first overall in 2014, was the 2011 MathCounts national champion, worked as a founding engineer at Scale AI, and co-founded Lunchclub before starting Cognition in 2023 with Steven Hao and Walden Yan. Scott Wu says Cognition is building Devin toward a broader human-computer interface: people describe what they want, and agents carry out the work. He argues that people underestimate AI progress by relying on historical patterns, while agents are already taking on longer tasks and could eventually pursue months-long missions. Wu says Cognition found enterprise traction by focusing on real engineering workflows, measuring delivered value, and routing work across models. He sees focus and independence as ways to build a lasting company, and says he would sell only if it were the most ambitious path. ### Minute by minute - [0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=0) **Competition becomes a strategy game.** Wu traces his competitive drive to losing a seventh-grade math competition when he was in second grade. He says he approaches building a company like a strategy game, calculating possible moves in a decision tree to find a path to success. - [2:00](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=120) **Competitions became a social circle.** Wu says math and programming competitions were central to his childhood, alongside games such as Super Smash Bros. and Tetris. He says the people he met through national and international competitions became closer friends than many of the people around him in Baton Rouge. - [4:19](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=259) **Go and competition shaped home.** Wu says his father was a strong Go player, and that a professor who played Go with him helped his parents find a path to the U.S. He describes his mother as the most competitive person in the family and says she supported him, valued education, and displayed his competition trophies. - [8:27](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=507) **Wu says losing hurts more.** Wu says losing feels worse than winning feels good, but not enough to make him stop trying. He says Cognition's nine-person founding team wants to build a generational business and a hyperscaler. Wu sees AI as a way to give people more power to create what they want. - [12:53](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=773) **Devin aims beyond code.** Wu describes Devin as an AI software engineer that works with teams on software from end to end. He says teams can use it to ship 10 times faster and do 10 times more, and that Cognition works with companies including Goldman Sachs and Mercedes. He argues that software agents can move beyond writing code toward letting people tell computers what to do, including one-off tasks that would not justify a human-built product. - [18:40](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1120) **AI demands first-principles thinking.** Wu says people struggle to intuit exponential progress and often predict the future by extending familiar patterns. He cites a METR report that measured AI as able to work for 10–20 seconds without interruption a couple of years earlier, with that duration doubling every couple of months; he says systems now handle tasks that take humans hours. He argues that first-principles thinking is needed to consider what happens when agents can work for days, weeks, or months. - [22:52](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1372) **Agents could take on long missions.** Wu imagines agents pursuing missions for months or years, not just completing short tasks. Examples include coordinating around a societal problem, designing a game, or exploring a materials-science idea. He also imagines a manager agent choosing missions and directing other agents. - [30:13](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1813) **Cognition began with iterative agents.** Wu says Cognition's original thesis combined software with multi-step, iterative processes. He says Devin's launch drew both excitement and accusations that it would not work, though the team showed real runs. A MongoDB setup task that Devin fixed convinced him the workflow could change software; Wu says Devin scored 13% on a benchmark, versus 3% or 4% for the best-known result at the time. - [37:12](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2232) **Repetitive tasks offered an enterprise entry point.** Wu says early pilots struggled with broad work on companies' codebases, so Cognition looked for repetitive, bounded tasks with tight feedback loops, such as migrations and version upgrades. He identifies NewBank, which he describes as Brazil's largest bank by market capitalization at the time, as the company's first success. He says enterprise accounts for about 75–80% of revenue. - [42:31](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2551) **Enterprise adoption needs hands-on support.** Wu says Cognition guides customers on feasible use cases, security, setup, and ways to get value from Devin. For its first customer, the whole team went to Brazil and worked directly with engineers; he says the current process is more self-serve, with guidance and customer visits as needed. Cognition tries to shorten a typical 12–18-month vendor adoption cycle to about three months. - [48:21](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2901) **Customers should measure delivered value.** Wu argues that customers should measure engineering output rather than rank engineers by token spend. He gives an example of bringing a project that might cost $15 million and take 18 months with a contractor in-house for $1 million and three months. He says Devin uses different models for different tasks, including models from major labs, its own models, and open-source options. - [52:14](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3134) **Focus helps startups compete.** Wu says Cognition focuses on software engineering rather than trying to match the breadth and resources of companies such as Microsoft or Google. He argues that serving real engineering teams requires working with existing codebases, ticketing systems, human collaborators, and testing—not just solving isolated coding problems. - [57:17](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3437) **Wu wants to build independently.** Wu says Cognition is betting on independence and that acquisitions can be a reasonable path for other companies. He says his team wants to build a generational business and rejects the idea that it is too late for new companies to create valuable products. - [1:00:22](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3622) **Wu ties a sale to ambition.** Wu says he would sell if doing so were the most ambitious path, rather than for a particular payout. He says he and his team could live with trying their hardest and falling short, but would regret not giving the company everything they could. ## Transcript Founders, hosted by David Senra, with Scott Wu. Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there. [0:02](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2) I want to know why you describe yourself as salty. What does that mean? I've just always been this way. As a kid, I just hated losing. Like, my first competitive memory ever is, like, when I was in second grade, I went to this seventh grade math competition. It was, like, a middle school competition that was held at the, like, local university or whatever for middle schoolers. But you were seven. Yeah, yeah. I was, like, seven or eight years old. I was competing in, like, middle school math. and like I did the like math test and whatever and then they were calling out the names of the like here's who got third place here's got second and it's kind of like waiting for my name to get called and then I was none of them and I just remember being so pissed about that yeah I can't really give you a rational explanation for why it is it doesn't have to be rational yeah like how much of your brain is dedicated to competition I mean it's all I do honestly I don't know I think feel like. Oh, what do you mean it's all you do? Well, I think strategy game, I don't know. It's the way even building a company, it feels the same. It's just like you're calculating the moves. [1:01](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=61) You're thinking about, okay, if you do this and then this happens and then you do that and here are the different moves and you're like calculating out what comes out to success. You know, it's like a, it's like a tree search, you know, where you're exploring the different options in the decision tree and you're trying to figure out how to lead to victory. Like that's like the only thing I do in my life. And so this is basically just, you don't have memories when you weren't like this basically i think that's right yeah yeah i was uh i was a little brother growing up and so my older brother was four or five years older than me and naturally we'd play video games and similarly i would just always be super salty there as well i don't know it's just like yeah it's just always like that so like i spent some time with demis from dmind and what was interesting is i i draw a lot of um like similarities between you two because i also spent some time with you and i was like well they're both really smart they're both articulate it, they have like a friendly UI, right? But then underneath that is like this like ruthlessly competitive drive. And Demis, I think he said this publicly, but I think he said like half his brain [1:58](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=118) is dedicated to competition. And a lot of that comes from his early days in chess. Yeah. What were you competing in when you were younger besides math competitions? Yeah, well, basically everything. So obviously the main thing was math and programming competitions. And so ever since I was really young, that was like, that was like my life, you know, my whole goal was to become like world champion of competitive programming i would do that all the time as a kid i would do you know the the really great thing about these competitions too is is you know you you compete in your school competition and if you do well enough in that then you make it qualify for the the a local or, like, the city competition, and then if you do well in that, then you get to, like, the regional competition and the state competition, and then you get to go to the national thing, the international thing, right? [2:39](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=159) And so it's, like, a very nice setup where sooner or later you get to kind of meet people who are like you, basically. When I was a kid, doing these competitions, going for that, it was, like, all I really cared about. Those people that I met through these national and international competitions were honestly more, like, they were my childhood friends more than, like, the people around me in Baton Rouge, Louisiana were. And it was like, we would hang out online, we would talk about math, we'd talk about problems. But all the other things, too, I mean, I played basically all the different competitive games. [3:08](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=188) So, like, I played a lot of Super Smash Brothers. I used to go to tournaments for Super Smash Brothers. It was a lot of fun. I played Melee. And then I played, like, Tetris. I played a lot of poker. I played some chess. I was okay at chess. I wasn't that good. I played some Go. My dad was a competitive Go player. My parents came to the U.S. in some sense because of Go, which was kind of a funny coincidence because my dad was in grad school in China and he had a professor who like really liked him the reason he liked him was because my dad was like a really good Go player like he was like a 7 Don at Go which if you were to call it in chess would be like I don't know 2300 or 2400 rating equivalent or something like that he would play with this professor you know on the weekends and stuff and they're like you know my dad would generally win and they would like talk about the games and stuff and then that professor ended up moving to the US to come and teach And at the time, you know, this was super early on and, you know, immigration from China to the U.S. [4:01](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=241) And so it was not a very like it wasn't really a path that people knew that you could take. The professor wrote my dad and said, hey, like I came. It's great. Like there's so much more opportunity. It's so much better. Like you should obviously come as well. Like I'll help you with your like visa application. I'll help you like apply to colleges here and everything. And so my dad applied to grad school in the U.S. And that's kind of how we ended up here in the first place. I was born after we moved to the U.S., obviously. So your dad was competitive in Go. What was your mom competitive in, though? Because I think I read that you said that she might have been the most competitive person in your family. [4:30](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=270) Yeah, no, she was always, she was definitely the most salty, I would say, for sure. I mean, she would. What does salty mean? Salty just means that you take offense to the idea of losing. Okay, I love that. Yeah, she would always be, oh, no, no, I'm better at this. I can beat you at this, you know, and I don't think she, I mean, she played ping pong a bunch growing up, actually. she played on her like school ping pong team obviously she studied some amount of math and so on um but but it was just it was more Or her personality than any one thing that she really put all of her competitive energy into. [5:04](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=304) I spent a lot of time, obviously, reading the biographies of History's Great Entrepreneurs. Yeah. I was fascinated by, like, there's usually two different kind of archetypes for the parents. One, you have, like, the Larry Ellison and Elon Musk. Their dads would literally tell them, you know, you're worthless. There's stories in Elon's biographies where his dad just gets in his fucking face and yells at him for hours. Larry's adopted father would just tell him you're never going to amount to anything. And so they had this, like, inner fire to disprove, you know, saying that basically, no, fuck you, Dad. [5:33](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=333) You're wrong about this, right? And then you have, like, the Estee Lauder's who, you know, their uncle or even their father is just like, you're really special. You have a lot of talents. If you put a lot of effort into this, you can do whatever you want. Your mom falls it more into, like, the Estee Lauder category where she would tell you that, like, hey, these people are doing amazing things. You could do even better than them, correct? I think they would have been happy enough if I just got, like, a more traditional, cushy job and did all of that. Like, I don't know that they specifically steered me towards entrepreneurship and being a founder. [6:03](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=363) But, no, they were always very supportive. But your mom gave you self-confidence? Yeah, I think she always told me that I was the best. And she was always extremely proud of the, you know, it's the, I had these, like, when you go to these math competitions. Hold on. So you said she always told you that you're the best. Did she say that before there was evidence? Yeah, I think so. I think that's right. I think even when I was, like, tiny, she would tell me that I was extremely talented. You know, she was always a huge source of support. And she always obviously believed in whatever I wanted to do. [6:37](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=397) You know, because you would compete in math competitions, you would get these trophies and stuff. And, like, we didn't have, like, you know, growing up, like, we didn't have, like, pictures of our parents, like, on the walls. You know, we just had old math competition trophies. It was like, my mom was very intentional about like, no, no, the thing that we value in this household. Other people's trophies are the ones you want. Ours, ours. The ones that me and my brother want, of course. We're going to put up pictures of other people's trophies and you'd better damn sure replace them with your own. [7:04](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=424) So like, you know, when I was pretty, my brother as well, you know, we both really liked these competitions. And so, like, you know, like, like, accumulate these trophies and she would always like every time we got one, she would hang it up and we're like put it up on the on the on the like the mantelpiece and everything. And no, it's like it's always I think what she really valued. I think I think education was really important to her. And I think being the best was very important to her as well. I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable private businesses in the world. 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[8:00](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=480) you couldn't otherwise and we see that in the ramp data to the median company running on ramp also grows their revenue by 16% so when you're running your business on ramp and your competitors are not you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on ramp I run my business on ramp and you should to go to ramp.com to learn how that can help your business save time, save money and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. What matters to you more? Like what is a, is it the, the pain of losing is like losing is worse than the love, like the thrill of winning. Cause that's how you started it. You're just like, I could not stand losing. Let me back up. I was reading another Larry Ellison biography. [8:52](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=532) He says this, he's just like, listen, I'm addicted to winning, but I fear losing more than I love winning. And I actually talked to Michael Dell about it. And he's like, yeah, it's just the fear of losing is the pain of losing is way worse than the good feeling of winning. So I think that's definitely true in terms of how it feels. In order to get anywhere, you got to lose a lot. If anything, almost like a lot of, you know, I mean, a lot of the guys are talking about, if anything, like the way they got to where they are is by losing a lot and having their share of wins along with that. But like, you just have to put yourself out there and do a lot. So it's kind of an interesting thing to your point of like, I definitely feel the same way that yeah like losing feels way worse than winning feels good but not by enough that it makes me want to stop trying if that makes sense yeah no i think it's possible i have i know your personality type like there's just impossible for you not to do this yeah what is like let's get into devon yeah what is like winning with devon look like to you so again you know we're hyper competitive but also you know the other thing about us is like we all had kind of started [9:47](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=587) our own companies before this so our founding team is a pretty big founding team is nine people and most of us had already founded our own companies before. We had done different things. It was true for a lot of the early team and we've always thought about this as like, this is a big one. And so like we- We want to go for it all. You know, we want to be a generational business. Like, we want to build a hyperscaler, and we want to go and do that. And, like, maybe we'll succeed, maybe we won't, I don't know. But, like, that's what we're going after. And I think, to me, what that means in our field in building software is, like, you know, people sometimes use the term, like, coding agents or, like, you know, like, AI programming or something. [10:22](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=622) I always, like, you know, I always hear that, I think, a little bit about, like, well, we're not always, I mean, we're not going to be interacting with code for that much longer, you know. Our programs might not be the right level of abstraction, but I think what is always true probably is that it will be the human computer interface. And so what I mean by that is like, like the way that we think about Devon, if we're successful, is Devon is the way that humans can tell their computers what to do. Because that was the whole point of software engineering anyway, right? It's just to be able to work with your computer and tell it what you want it to do. [10:53](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=653) I mean, I think doing that for the world is like a massive opportunity. and that's what we're really excited to go after. Why is that interesting to you? You just said we all did different things. We came together and we're like, no, this is the big one. Yeah. I mean, the simple answer is, you know, we're a bunch of nerds who were all programmers and built software and so on before and now this is the idea of teaching AI how to go do that. Wait, say more about that. What you just said, we're all nerds. This is the big one because we can actually teach AI how to program. We're all nerds who've spent the last, you know, I don't know, 20 years of our lives just coding and making little things for the world And the idea that you could teach AI how to go make things and have everybody have an AI that can help them make things and feel the wonder of that, I mean, it's pretty sick. [11:34](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=694) Is that the idea, the single idea in the world that animates you the most, that gets you the most excited? I think it is incredible, yeah. I mean, well, I would go further, too, and just say, like, at a zoomed-out level, it's – I honestly think that – because, you know, everyone talks about AGI, everyone talks about what is the future going to be like? Like, what are human lives going to be, you know, once AI can do everything? And, I mean, to some extent, I think the thing that is most human, obviously, is self-expression, creativity, like having things that you want to make happen in the world and being able to go do those things, right? [12:08](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=728) And so, I mean, a lot of how I think about this is basically we want to build the tool that gives everybody the power to go and make things that they want to make in the world. My co-founder has this line, which I've always loved, which is, you know, we've been spending all this time living in survival mode as a species, you know, and now we're going to be living in creative mode. And I think that's right. I think, you know, Minecraft survival mode is where you're like, you know, you're growing food, you're like making sure you're safe from the monsters at night and whatever. And like creative mode is just like, everything's up to you. [12:43](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=763) You know, you have all the resources at your disposal. If you want something to happen, it'll happen. And the only question for you is like what you want to make happen. I think it's going to be amazing. And I mean, I think that is like the world that we're going towards. And like, we want to be the ones building that. Okay. So talk about what Devin does today. Yeah. And then I want you to flesh out that idea of, like, where you see it in the future. It's just the interface between humans and computers. Sure. Yeah, so Devon is today, you know, what folks know as an AI software engineer. And basically what that means is that Devon is a tool that anyone can use that will work with them end-to-end on building out software. [13:21](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=801) And so we work with a lot of the biggest companies across the world. You know, we work with Goldman Sachs. We work with Mercedes. We work with, you know, a lot of areas of the U.S. government at this point and so on. And we work with their software teams to just help them build more and do much more. And, you know, the thing about it is in the last 20, 30 years, obviously, I mean, software is eating the world is the famous line. I think it's very much true. It's still like, it's still got a couple order magnitudes to go. And in practice, what it looks like is that teams use Devon to ship 10 times faster and to do 10 times more. [13:51](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=831) Okay, so that's where it's at today. Yeah. How do you get to where you're saying, you're just the interface between humans and computers? So now we're going to get into a philosophical discussion of what it means to be a programmer or a software engineer, right? And I think if you go all the way back, there was a time where programming was like using the vacuum tubes, plugging all those in and having the machine do the arithmetic, right? Like the ENIAC was, in some sense, the first computer out there, although it was obviously very different. Or it would have been like, you know, filling out the punch cards and like setting up the or writing, you know, the like putting down assembly, you know, or writing in basic or something. [14:26](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=866) Right. So we've gone through a lot of generations already is my point. And what does it look like, you know, going forward when you talk about programming, all it really comes down to is like, how do you tell your computer what to do? And like every single piece of software that you use, if you're using, you know, Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or whatever, like that's a piece of software that somebody or like some, you know, in these cases, to some pretty big teams of engineers came together and thought through all these details of, okay, here's what I want it to do. Here's how I want it to look. [14:55](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=895) Here's what I want this button to do. Here's how I want to architect it. Every single little decision. obviously was made by somebody, but the computer itself is then executing it accordingly to what the wishes of its creators was, right? And I think what we'll start to see is that abstraction will continue to climb, right? And like, you know, we kind of see this already. Like at this point, you don't need to know a programming language. It's like, you don't need to know Python or Java or something like that in order to build your own software, right? And you can just say, hey, here's what I want. I want to make a cool website that does this, this, and that. Or, For example, you know, in my existing product, you know, here's what we have today and I want to change this thing or add this new plan or add this new feature and just have the agent go and do that for you, right? [15:40](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=940) I think we're going to continue to go further down that axis. One important kind of like distinction I'd make, which is, you know, I think what we'll see a lot more of in the near future is software today, that the math only really works out to create software if it's going to be used at least like a million times or something. You know, I'm giving a, maybe it's 10,000 times or whatever. And my point is like, if you want to go build a product today, you need a whole team of engineers. Engineers are expensive. You got to pay salaries. You got to go build all this out and you got to go and do that, right? [16:09](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=969) You need that software to be used enough times or to create enough value for that to be worth it, right? And, you know, something like YouTube passes that test because obviously so many, so many hours have been spent on building YouTube, but way more hours have been spent on using YouTube. and that's what's made that work out and made it feasible, right? But there are so many things out there which only, you know, very specific things that only need to be used a few times or even like only need to be used once, right? And so like all the white collar work that we talk about today even is very, all right, you know, wake up in the morning. [16:43](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1003) All right, I'm gonna go look through these like 15 LinkedIn profiles. I'm gonna look for this and that or whatever or I'm gonna go fill out these forms or I'm gonna do this data analysis and put this Excel sheet together with this research that I found, right? All of these things are things that could be done with software. It's just, it obviously doesn't make sense to hire a whole team of people to go make you that piece of software, [17:06](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1026) **Scott Wu:** which you're going to use one time and never again, versus just having the human go and do that themselves, right? [17:10](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1030) I think what we're going to get to is we're going to get to a point where you are just giving your instructions to that agent. And the agent on the back end, you know, you don't even have to look at this, but on the back end, the agent is going to figure out, okay, here's, I'm going to write this code that's going to go do this. I'm going to put a script that automates this part. I'm going to do this and do this. And that's what's going to allow it to actually go and do it. all these things. But what you start to get to, you know, as we're kind of saying, it's like, this is really just how you control your computer and how you do what you want to go do, right? And you wake up in the morning and it's like, here's what I want to go do. You talk to your agent about it. You figure out the task together. Once it has it, it can do the part of the literal, like, all right, put the pen to the paper on writing code. But that task is like, you know, you're the one that's deciding what to do. So this ideal future that's in your mind, right? How far away do you think we are to that? [18:00](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1080) Yeah. I mean, we've made a lot of steps toward it. I would say we still have got a ways to go. You can use Devon today. You can use all the different kind of coding tools today. And you can do a lot more than you could have done, you know, 10 years ago. But certainly, or even one year ago or six months ago. But certainly, you know, it's not at the level that we're talking about of you are neural linked into the AI and you can tell it exactly what you want it to do and what you want to see in the world and just have the AI go and do that. When do we get there? It's hard to say, but I honestly, I mean, I think we'll have solved most of that over the next five years or so. [18:35](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1115) In AI terms, five years is like a century. You know, in the rest of the world terms, obviously, it's like, it's kind of crazy to imagine that things can change that much in five years, but I really think it will. So this is kind of related to something I heard you say, where you're saying that humans just have a really hard time understanding exponential curves. It's totally true. I mean, you see this in the progress itself. You see this in the scaling laws with the data. You see this in the revenue curves of the companies that are building an AI. Including your own. And it's a very, you know, it's like humans aren't really wired for this, right? [19:07](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1147) Like all of our like inherent like fight or flight response are kind of like our ability to kind of like measure things to vastly oversimplify. If you're just, you know, fighting out there, you know, foraging for food or whatever it is, like, you know, a good hunt will bring you, you know, a couple days worth of food or something. But obviously, with the kind of exponential curves that we deal with, you know, the equivalent of a good hunt here could be a thousand years worth of food. And we don't have that intuitive signal in our brains to really understand that, right, at a really deep, like, native level. [19:39](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1179) People often understand, I think, how fast things can change and how fast the world can change. I mean, my parents even, like, drilled this into me because they grew up in, you know, in communist China. And they came to the U.S. And, you know, even that, like we're talking about what are what we're ultimately even like much slower scales of progress in some sense relative to, I think, what we're seeing today. But even that. was like, as you can imagine, it was incredibly jarring to them. You know, the idea that, like, you come to the U.S. and everybody has a car and all of these different, you know, it's like everyone has all these household appliances and has all, you know, it was a very different life when they grew up in, like, you know, the 60s in China. [20:20](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1220) And they were much, much poorer and it was very, very different, right? And it's like, I mean, funnily enough, people got used to all these things pretty quickly and now we can't live without them. But I think we'll kind of undergo the same period with AI, where five years from now, it's going to be insane to think about all these things that we're going to have. Ten years from now, we're going to have forgotten that we ever lived without them, honestly. What do you think you understand about AI that other people don't? The reason I ask the question is because we have some mutual friends. I would describe our mutual friends as some of the most AGI-pilled people that I know. [20:49](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1249) Yeah. And I feel every time I have a conversation with them, I'm like, oh, even though I pay attention to this stuff, I feel like a toddler compared to somebody like you. And so I'm very curious, like, what do you understand about AI that most people do? Yeah. And even people within the tech industry. No, you're way too generous. I don't know that there's, I don't know that I have that, anything that interesting or that deep of an insight. I mean, I think it's, it's. You say that because you're used to it. Here's what I'd say, is the way that folks typically kind of predict the future or think about what happens next is they pattern match based on what they've seen historically. [21:24](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1284) And they say, okay, well, for a hundred years, it's always been like this. and it's probably safe to assume that it will be. And 99% of the time that works great, right? And in these particular periods where things that actually move and they're real things that are different, those are the 1% of times where it truly is different. Now you just kind of, you know, rather than any kind of pattern matching, like what really matters is just thinking about things from first principles. Like AI, you know, there's the famous like METR report, which was saying, you know, a couple of years ago, AI would do about 10 to 20 seconds worth of human work without interruption. Then you'd have to guide it or direct it or it would make a mistake or something like that. 10 seconds, 20 seconds, [22:04](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1324) **Scott Wu:** and that's just doubled every couple of months, basically. Now we're talking about hours of work. Basically, an AI can just take a task that would have taken humans hours of work to go do. If you [22:16](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1336) go and describe that task well enough to the AI, it will just go and do the whole thing and come back to you with the result. And then you give it the next thing, the next thing, right? And if you just ask from a first principles question, well, why can't that be days? Or why That'd be weeks or months of work. And then what does the world look like if everybody has an agent that can just do months of work for them at a time? Then you get to a pretty different conclusion from what we've all seen and what we've all lived for the last several years. And I think that that kind of first principles thinking is as different as it sounds and as crazy as it sounds, you know, this is one of those times where it's actually more correct than the simple pattern match. [22:56](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1376) So I think you've even taken this further where you're like, well, what happens when they can work for a year unassisted? Yeah, yeah. And I think that's true, and I think we will get there. If Devin could work for a year without any human assistance, what would you have it do right now? Destroy your competitors? All sorts of things. I mean, no, I mean, I still wake up and think about this in every different, like, you know, every little thing that I run. You know, dumb example. Yesterday, I was sending out, like, a bulk email. And I was like trying to get the like email formatter to work and it's like kind of painful, you know, some of these things are still like kind of hard to use or it doesn't support a certain like styling of the email that you wanted to go do. [23:37](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1417) I think the thing I like had pasted something with indents and then it was like, it just couldn't like un-indent them because the editor like, I don't know, there were some weird things where the editor like would not allow you to un-indent one part but not the other or whatever. And I was just thinking, like, it's really crazy that, like, that I'm still doing this, basically, right? Like, in as much simplicity or honestly more as it would take you to explain this to another person. Like, hey, here's what I want to do. I just, like, I'm just trying to make it look like this and then this and then that. [24:08](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1448) Like, the rest of that execution should just be done for you, you know? And then you get to the point where you actually really just get to spend all your time thinking about, well, what do you want to do? You know, what do you want to build? What do you want to create? Like, what are the things that you want to see in the world that aren't there already? But I think what makes it interesting about what you were saying earlier is, like, the more you increase the time, the more interesting it gets to me. So, like, there's this guy named Edwin Land, who I won't shut up about. And he was the founder of Polaroid. [24:31](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1471) Yeah, yeah. Steve Jobs' hero. A lot of what we think of as Steve Jobs' ideas literally just came from Edwin Land down to, like, the chairs and the table he would use for his presentations. It's, like, the same thing that Edwin Land used in, like, the 70s in Polaroid. And he thought of himself as a scientist, not as an entrepreneur, Edwin Land. He died with, I think, the third most patents. He was like Thomas Edison, some other dude, and then Edwin Land. And what he did is he couldn't figure out, he invented the industry of instant photography before you took a picture, and you're like, hey, how's it going? [25:00](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1500) to look like we'll find out two weeks from now when we get back to kodak like i have no idea and he now we take he took a picture of a polaroid he's like we'll find out in 60 seconds when it dries but that was black and white forever when i read that part where you're like well we're gonna have agents that can work on a sister for a year yeah i didn't think of what i would do which is a question i just asked i thought of edwin land hiring this guy he's like i want you to think about how we turn this from black and white into color yeah and before he could begin the guy worked there and just thought for two years sure i'm like that would be very convenient if i could have an agent attacks problem and while i'm working in the background because i can't figure it out they're just thinking about how to attack a single problem for two in his case it's the guy that fucking solved instant color photography just took him two years of thinking to do it so this is like i'm going to push you on this a little bit more because like no i don't want your year-long agent to send bulk email oh i agree i can do it just to be clear so so i i and i think at some point it's it's kind of you know you see this right where it's like um you know when you're [25:53](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1553) talking about seconds you're literally talking about just like a specific command right when you're talking about hours, you're talking about giving it a task and having it do the task, right? And I agree with you, obviously, bulk email is not, you know, for years, what you're talking about is like, you're giving the agent a mission, basically, you know? And it's like, this is- That sounds way more fun. Yeah, exactly. And this is like, what do I care about? And, you know, the answer might be, look, I want to give you a million different examples. You know, the answer might be, look, there's this like one, you know, societal problem, which is really important to me. And I think there's like, I think it's a solvable problem. [26:25](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1585) I think we can all be happy, but we really need to spread awareness about it. We really need to get folks to understand the points of it. And we need to figure out how everybody should work together and coordinate on it. I think that's your point. [26:39](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1599) **Scott Wu:** That's a problem that an agent can think about, right? [26:41](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1601) Or even some of the kind of like sillier things too, like, yeah, there's this video game that I really like, but I wish, if I were making the game, here's exactly how I would think about all these things. And I feel like there's like this really cool idea if, you know, you could combine elements from this one game that I really like, but then incorporate some of the elements from this other game and set the agent off on that mission of like, look, we're going to go and like make the coolest thing ever and the coolest game ever. And like, we're going to incorporate those elements. We're going to think about how those like, you know, nicely intertwine and work together, right? [27:12](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1632) Or if it's like, here's this like piece of just like novel science, which I'm just like really passionate about. You know, materials have been created this way for years and years, But like, like, here's this like avenue of attack, which I've been wondering about and thinking about of maybe there's there's a different. like novel construction of materials this way, send your agent to go work on that for years, you know, or months, right? And like have it study that and explore these things and run its own experiments and trial these. I think all of these are, I think, soon going to be very possible. [27:44](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1664) And to your point, it's very different. Yeah, like the framing of we're sending them on missions. Yeah. I would have one that would pick the missions that I need to send other agents on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then you'll have the AI, which is like the manager AI of the missions. Yeah. And I think it's like, I think we will continue. And, you know, it's my example of this is like I always joke about how, you know, if you think about our ancestors from, you know, hundreds of years ago or thousands of years ago, imagine them looking at us and what we do. And it's like, you know, you're pushing buttons, you know, and you're like sitting in a room and talking with other people and you call that a meeting. [28:16](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1696) And that's like those things, that's work for you guys, you know, and it's like, what do you mean that's work? You know, like I'm in the fields, like I'm doing this every day, you know, I'm going and farming. I'm making sure that, you know, making all of our like, you know, clothes by hand or taking care of all these things. And that's like work, you know, but like how can you guys call, you know, and my point is just, I think what we will have going forward is going to look that different from what we have today. We will look at people who, as we say, just like have these really interesting curiosities that they want to pursue. [28:49](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1729) They have, like, causes that they're passionate about. They have, like, fun ideas or, like, art that they want to create. And, like, they're sending off their agents in pursuit of those missions. And they will think of that as work. And we will look at them and be like, wow, it's kind of crazy that that's what you get up and think about all day. I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places. And they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. [29:22](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1762) That is exactly what Applovin has done with their advertising platform. Applovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. Applovin allows you to capture undivided attention. Applovin ads are full screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on Applovin in minutes. You set the goal, and Applovin achieves it. There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and Applovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses. [30:00](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1800) have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovin. And you can do that by going to AppLovin.com. That's AppLovin.com. When you started Cognition, did you know that you were going to try to make an automated software engineer? Was that your first idea? I'll say it was always two things. One, it was always related to code and software, which again probably has something to do with us all being programming nerds. And then two is it was always around the idea that these would be like real multi-step iterative processes which was a, I would say was a real hot take at the time. [30:45](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1845) Like this was 2023. Okay, so this is when I met you guys and I was on a walk with a mutual friend of ours and I remember first here, this is, you guys scaled from what like like, a million in revenue to, like, 500 million or something like that in, what, like, 20 months or something? Yeah, yeah, a little more than 18 months. I remember before, I got no revenue, and I heard the idea, and it was pitched as, like, essentially, like, an automated software engineer. And I was like, holy shit. It was, like, a huge—you're going after labor. This is a huge market. And then you released— Yeah. I remember the demo video. [31:14](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1874) Yeah. And then you got a lot of shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that a quick thread? Well, it's kind of a mix of—I think is the full polar ends of the spectrum, right? So there were some people who were like, this is the coolest thing ever, and then there were some people who were like, this is the worst thing that you could buy. Similarly, in terms of the capabilities, there were some people who were like, oh, my God, everybody's going to lose all their jobs tomorrow, which is not what we've ever really believed or thought of this as. To also like, dude, there's no way this is ever going to work, and this is totally a scam. [31:50](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1910) you know so what was the criticism did you did you release the product earlier than you wanted to well look it's it's it wasn't even a product at the time to be honest i mean it was more just like a prototype or like a demo of what was possible and and you know we had been working with it and playing with it for a few months at that point and the kind of just wanted to show people some of the examples of what it was capable of because there was a real like like it was [32:12](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1932) **Scott Wu:** pretty i mean it was pretty insane for us to see as well like i remember the first time that it did like a real task. Like I could not sleep that night. And so it's just like showing that. [32:22](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1942) Wait, wait, say more about that. The first task that Devin did was it like set up MongoDB for us. And it's like, you know, it's a, it's, it's. Standard thing, it's issues that a lot of people run into all the time when they're going and getting their kind of, like, initial, you know, DB set up or whatever. But we would just, like, run into errors. You have this whole flow where you, like, find an error. You Google error. You find some message on Stack Overflow or whatever. Or you ask Chachi to be, and it tells you, okay, here's what you should try. You try that thing. You run into a different error. [32:53](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=1973) You should, like, paste that in. And, you know, and, like, for this one, we kind of, like, at some point, We're just like, okay, Devon, just try to go fix it. Just go run commands, like do whatever you need to go do it. And then it worked. And you couldn't sleep. It was truly like, because again, it's like just seeing the exponential curve ahead. Because this was a very specific case. It was the one success that we had. It was very much like definitely a way better than average run. But no, there was this feeling of like, why shouldn't all software and all products be built this way now? Like, you can just tell it what you want it to do and have it go do it. [33:31](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2011) I mean, it's kind of funny because, yeah, to your point, like, we did get hate in the beginning. We did not feel motivated at all from the hate to be like, oh, yeah, no, maybe you guys are right. Like, maybe we should go and, like, you know, focus on the more kind of, like, chatbot Q&A style product experiences. Like, maybe more than we should have. Maybe we should have done something in the middle, you know? I don't know. But, like, I think for us, like, when we had seen that and when we had done these different things, like, all of those, like, demos that we showed, you know, in our launch announcement were like actual runs of Devon that we had done ourselves and like run into and been like, holy shit, this is insane. [34:05](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2045) For us, it was always kind of like, look, you can, you know, we can debate when or like what level of effectiveness or whatever, but like it's just, it's going to happen and that's how we always felt about it. So explain the process of iteration to go from that product, you're getting a lot of hate. Actually, you know what? I called Jeremy Stern who wrote this excellent profile of you in Colossus, which there's a lot of parts I was just laughing my ass off, by the way. And I was asking, I was like, tell me the stuff that didn't make the profile. Yeah. And he said there wasn't that much because you're kind of like an open book and a lot of people like manage their media. [34:39](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2079) Yeah. And, you know, you could have to talk about certain stuff off the record or whatever and you were just like saying everything. But you did say something about like you made the point where like when you released the first product, what was the benchmark? Sweet Bench. And it was at like 13%. That was Devin. Yeah, yeah. And your point was that that's already better than... Yeah, at the time, the best known was like 3% or 4% or something like that, but obviously, yeah, 13%. It still means you fail, you know, 87% of the time. Was there a pronounced benefit from releasing early like that? For sure, yeah. [35:06](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2106) I mean, so for us, by the way, you know, if you kind of think about this overall AI ecosystem, I mean, a simple way to put it, it's like, dude, we were late by a lot. You know, it's like OpenAI started. Why, though? Google DeepMind or Google Brain, I mean, these are obviously, you know, more than a decade old already. OpenAI started like end of 2015 or even, you know, like the Anthropic or, you know, other that folks talk about in the world, like had been around already for years. Like, we were getting started in early 2024. It was like a year plus out from the ChatGPT launch. A lot of the existing players were already there. [35:37](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2137) You know, the same was true in code specifically. I mean, there was, you know, GitHub Copilot, which people had already, you know, engineers had already used for years. And that was very much the, like, Q&A, like the autocomplete style experience of, you know, working with AI. You know, when you start a company, you kind of have nothing. Like, you have no right to exist is maybe one way to put it. But it's like an interesting truth about the world, which is obviously startups succeed. You know, startups succeed all the time. And then startup versus big company has been played out for, you know, for forever. [36:09](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2169) But like, there's no reason, you know, in terms of resources, in terms of people, in terms of brand awareness, like you have none of the things that, you know, the big guys have. And so from that perspective, you have no right to win, you know, over what they're doing, you know. The reason that you're sometimes able to anyway is if you really, like, you know, plant your flag on the ground and put a stake into, like, what you think the future is, and you run like hell towards that, and if you, like, turn out to be right on some of the core things. And, like, I think we were wrong on a lot of things, to be clear. [36:48](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2208) A lot of things we were, you know, definitely we were early, which is a very fair criticism. I think a lot of the details and the nuances, like, we learned and adjusted over time. But the idea that like you would work with AI as a coworker, you know, rather than as like a tool or a chat bot, I think was, I mean, over the last couple of years has obviously like really grown. And I think it was like very important for us, for our brand, for recruiting, for, you know, customer work, everything for us to be, you know, the first ones that actually planted that flag in the ground and said that. So when did you have this idea where you guys are going to take a run at very, I would say, ferociously to, like, these giant, like, Fortune 500 companies or even, like, the U.S. Army uses you? [37:27](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2247) Sure. Like, where did that strategy come from? So, funnily enough. So that launch was in March of 2024. And to your point, it went very viral, but again, we didn't have any customers, we didn't have any revenue, we didn't really have like... I thought your first iteration of the business model was like $500 a month or something, wasn't it? Am I misremembering this? So we had that, that was actually later on, actually. That was end of 2024. Okay. But, you know, initially what we started was just like, you know, a bunch of people came, asked us for the product. We were like, guys, I don't know if this is a product that's ready for primetime, but if you really, you know, you can try it and like just let us know. [37:59](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2279) And so, like, people ran, you know, we had to go and scramble to build a system of, like, oh, okay, let's do, like, a pilot or, like, a PSC, you know, and, like, we tried our best to, like, not overpromise and be like, guys, like, really, it's, like, very early, but if you want to try it, you know, you can try it. And we did all these, and perhaps unsurprisingly, I mean, they were all just, like, failing, which is kind of natural. Like, it's, like, you could do some pretty cool things with it. You could do some pretty interesting, like, toy demos or projects or whatever, but it was certainly not ready to work on like an actual company's like real code base and so on, right? [38:31](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2311) And so from that point, this would have been like April or May of 2024. We were making agents work with like GPT-4. You know, this was like a very different era. So they were much more primitive agents. We kind of talked about this and got to this question of like, okay, well, what do we think it actually does look like when the agents start to get good enough for adoption? And I think what we kind of came to was, well, different tasks are different, right? And so, like, there are some tasks out there that are just really mundane and really repetitive, and you're just doing the same tedious thing over and over and over again. [39:02](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2342) And there are some tasks on the other end of the spectrum that are, like, really tough, like, architecture problems or, like, deep, like, you know, deep issues that you have to, like, really understand all the context and have all the know-how to know how to fix. And, like, people were trying to use Devon for all of this, and were failing at it, understandably. And so then the question was like, okay, what are the natural tasks that are like, if there's like a first task that is going to have PMF, you know, and real value from these kind of agent experiences where it can do the whole thing end to end, what is that going to be? [39:34](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2374) We kind of said, okay, well, it should be some of these like really repetitive, tedious ones. It's not so cut and dry that you can just like have an automated script that does the exact thing every time. so it does take obviously some intelligence and some amount of meandering but it is like repetitive enough and scoped enough and like on a tight enough feedback loop that you can have an agent do it and it would be able to kind of go and diagnose and like fix that problem right and so that's kind of what brought us to some of these like to some of these like, you know, initial use cases, which were things like migrations or version upgrades or, you know, helping people upgrade from like Java 7 to Java 8 or something like that, which were kind of like, you know, as you can imagine, enterprises had these massive code bases where they would go and do all that, you know, and it's like a 50,000 file code base where you have to go, you know, it's like the same eight things that you need to change in each one. [40:21](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2421) you have to be a little bit thoughtful about how you'd make the trade-offs, but it's a very [40:24](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2424) **Scott Wu:** repetitive task, right? Our first success ended up being with a company called NewBank, biggest bank in Brazil by market cap at the time. And the use case was one of these big migrations. [40:36](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2436) And we had a custom Devon that was extremely, extremely optimized for doing that. And as we grew from there, later on, as things got a little bit more mature, we've had both self-serve business and enterprise business and so on. But I think from the beginning, we had always seen this value that building software in the real world and managing massive, massive products that millions of people use every day was pretty substantially different from just building a cute website or a cute demo from scratch. And I think we really, really leaned into that. And naturally, all the Fortune 500 or all the biggest companies in the world are software companies in 2026, even the ones that folks don't necessarily think of that way, right? And like Walmart or CVS or JP Morgan or Mercedes or whatever, you know, they're all software companies, right? They have massive, massive teams of software engineers. They have tons of things that they're building and shipping and maintaining. And that kind of became like a natural thing for us to work on because like we had learned very early on that we want to work on real problems and we want to work on things that matter and that people actually care about. [41:40](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2500) So wait, what percentage of your revenue is coming from enterprise then? Today, around 75, 80%. What are people using on the self-serve? Like, what are examples of? Yeah. So, we have a lot of teams who use it in self-serve. I mean, that's grown, actually. You know, that's grown quite a bit as well lately. But, you know, we have startups who, you know, we have Exa, who uses it a ton, or Open Router. You know, I ran into someone in my apartment in the elevator the other day. Oh, you're the Devon guy. Like, we use Devon. Are you Devon? I've gotten that as well. Hey, are you Devon? And I was like, you know, I'm actually not, but that's okay. [42:18](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2538) Why didn't we call it Scott? You know, there's kind of both self-serve and enterprise. With that said, it is entirely in both sides. It is still like actual engineering teams building real output. And so we don't. We don't focus at all on like, you know, individual hobbyists who are just like trying to make a cool thing or something like that. We focus on like real teams who are building real products that they want people to use and getting output out of that. Okay. Can you walk us through? I'm very curious. Like I'm a big enterprise. I contact you. Walk us through what happens to being a customer. [42:48](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2568) You know, it starts with education and everyone's gone crazy over AI and agents and so on. And those are the buzzwords of the last six months, obviously. So they want to know more about this, but there's still a lot of detail and like, what does it actually look like to deploy them? So, you know, we'll show them what this looks like. We'll talk them through like how we work with teams and how we partner, you know, how we direct them to the right use cases, how we give them guidance on like how, you know, to maximize their ROI or like what projects are or are not feasible with agents. And then from there, you know, enterprises typically obviously have some very messy processes. [43:20](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2600) And so, you know, for most software or most, you know, just generally like vendors that they'd want to work with, it's often, I mean, as you can imagine, for a massive bank, you know, adopting software, giving it access to all of their, you know, their repos, getting through security or whatever, that's like usually for typical companies, it's like a 12 to 18 month cycle. The thing that we do naturally is we just work with them to figure out how we go and do that as fast as is humanly possible. Did you send employees down to South America for NewBank? [43:49](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2629) **Scott Wu:** Well, so NewBank, I mean, the first one, honestly, our entire team was the foreign deploy team. Like, we all flew to Brazil. [43:54](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2634) Like, I mean, it's like the first case, you know, it's like, let's be real here, okay? Agents did not work generally, okay? And so there was a lot of, like, how do you make it work for you? Very specific. Like, we all flew to Brazil. I was there. The whole team was there. We were sitting there with their engineers, understanding, okay, so this is what you do in that case. This is what you do in that case. And this is what Devin needs to know. and Devon needs to be able to read these things and like going and debugging their like exact problems. Now, obviously, it's not like that at all because, you know. [44:22](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2662) Hold on, we'll get to where it is now. But the idea of like, no, we didn't deploy a team. We deployed the whole company. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, getting the first customer obviously was like a real, you know, it's like, I mean, I wonder what they thought of that. But like, yeah, it was like literally like, okay, let's go through all these different things that you guys think could make sense. Let's go through each one. Let's try some of it manually ourselves to understand what the task looks like. Let's see if we can teach Devin to do this correctly and build in the right orchestration for Devin to be able to do this. [44:54](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2694) And let's just basically building the product was almost like building for one company. And yeah, it was fun. So what do you do today? So today it's obviously much more self-start and agents are so much more capable, obviously. And we've figured out a lot more things with the onboarding experience. But a lot of it is, we're saying these cycles typically take 12 to 18 months. We try to get deployed with folks in like three months. And a lot of that requires folks to, obviously, first of all, it requires them to really appreciate that it's a priority. I mean, if you have 25,000 software engineers and an org that's running that costs $10 billion a year or something that you think can move three times faster, usually it is a priority. [45:40](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2740) But then it's like figuring out how we get through the security reviews. We can deploy in their private cloud. We have very strict data agreements. We have tight air walls on all these things, obviously. Do employees physically have to go? Are they working with, like, are these deals so big that they're working with a specific company and only that company for a period of time or no? Typically, no. We have, you know, we have a full, like, forward deployed motion. But a lot of what that looks like, as we're saying, is a little bit more like user education and guidance. And so we will fly, you know, we still do this, but we'll fly out and kind of, like, go and see customers and work with them, point them to the right use cases, teach them how to get success, help them with their like setup and their playbooks, like all these things for how to use Devon. [46:29](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2789) But it's much more a kind of like, look, we're here to assist you guys. We're giving you a lot of this kind of like direction and so on. But like you are yourself, you know, and your team is the one that's using Devon and running all that, right? So that's a lot of what that looks like. We're set up to be as incentive aligned with our customers as possible. And so a lot of it is like, is not just like, oh, here's this tool, like hand it over to your engineers and like find out what they say about it. It's like, okay, well, let's figure out like, what are the initiatives that you guys really care about and like we will point you to for those initiatives here are each of the projects that we think devon right now can make you 10 times faster on and we'll tell you for the ones that that it's not and here's here's what workflows you should use instead or here's how you should get to value instead but it looks more like that than like a um than than like a literal like you know we are using devon on your on your on your behalf or something deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade and one thing they [47:25](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2845) all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. 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Deal will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers the founder of 11 labs has a great description of the value deal can give your company he said we built 11 labs to break down language and communication barriers with deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices stories and ideas to every corner of the world deal is trusted by over 40 000 businesses learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com forward slash Senra. That is deal.com forward slash Senra. Wait, so tell me more about how you align the [48:32](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2912) incentives between your company and then your customers. Yeah, so a couple of things here, which I think are really important. One, obviously, is just like really working with them on the very clearly defining the ROI, which I think is a very important, I mean, it's like everyone's talking about this, right? Like over the last few months, like people are going crazy on their token budgets and, you know, one engineer can spend so much. And, you know, you want to know that that's actually doing real value for you and you want to be able to identify where you are. Do you think all this stuff is a little crazy? I think it is directionally correct, but I think there's some, you know, there are definitely some places where people have gotten carried away. You know, people talk about, oh, like, yeah, like, we rank our engineers by how many tokens they're spending. Well, let's try and rank people by how much output they're actually producing or how much good work, you know, is actually getting done, you know, but obviously I think that, like, the math works out in terms of, like, you know, the GPUs are expensive, but, like, [49:21](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2961) **Scott Wu:** if your engineers are actually able to ship three times more, you know, then it's very clearly worth it. You just want to make sure you're doing it the right way, right? Obviously a lot there on [49:28](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=2968) just like tying to specific outcomes, tying to, okay, what are the actual tickets that are getting done? What are the projects and the initiatives? And like this project, which was scooped out for 18 months and was going to be handed off to, you know, an outsourced contractor and was going to cost you 15 million. Like, let's just talk about how that you do this all internally with your own team and you do it for 1 million and you get it all done in three months, you know, stuff like that, which I think is super important. The second thing which I'll call out especially is just being neutral. A lot of discussion, obviously. [50:00](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3000) What do you mean by that? Being neutral with respect to all the labs, the models themselves. Yeah, I think you said you like being Switzerland. Yeah, we like being Switzerland, exactly. And so I think it's like an important thing of, you know, we are just as incentivized as they are to figure out how to make their token spend efficient, right? And so Devin is purposely meant to be, you know, a compound model system. And so all of these different things, you know, for the right task or even the right subtask of a task or something like that. Describe what a compound model system is. Yeah, yeah. So for each different part of your use case, I mean, imagine, let's say you tell Devin, hey, customer just reported this bug, you know, there's a Jira ticket, can you take a look at the ticket and like go and solve the whole thing, right? What does Devin actually go do, right? First of all, Devin's probably going and like investigating, understanding like what does the report say, what's going on? Second of all, probably, you know, as any engineer should, like it's going to go and try to reproduce the bug itself, right? [50:54](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3054) So it'll say, okay, let me spin up the product locally. We click around, try to follow the same steps that they followed and see if I can make the bug happen as well, right? Then if you did that, then like, okay, now you're looking at the logs. You're trying to figure out what went wrong. You're pinpointing what are the particular files or what was the flow of, you know, what was the command flow that led to this. Then you do the debugging. Then you go and test it again. Make sure, you know, all these steps, right? Then you put it up for review. And it turns out that there are different models that are good for different parts of these tasks, right? [51:21](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3081) And even across different tasks, obviously, also, it's like some tasks are these really crazy hard ones where you want to actually use max thinking and you want to use the very best models you can get your hands on in the world, right? And then many other tasks are, you know, boilerplate enough or repetitive enough that what you care about is just getting it done really fast, getting an immediate answer, having the ability to verify that it was correct, but then beyond that, making sure that it was like as cheap and fast and efficient as possible, right? And so Devin, rather than being pegged to one model and saying, oh, we're only going to serve you GPT for this or we're only going to serve you Opfist for this, Devin can use any of the different models it has in its arsenal, which include all of these models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, et cetera, but also our own models, right, or open source models out there. [52:08](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3128) And it will, you know, dynamically go and choose these models for these tasks. How do you think about this? Like, you're a customer of them, but also competitor with. Yeah. No, I mean, look, I think in practice, there's a lot of positive, some work for us to do together. And so, like, you know, the way that we think about ourselves, a couple things. One, software is the only thing that we care about, obviously. And there's a lot of value and focus and in building products and building our home home motions specifically around that. Say more about how you think about focus and the value in it. You know, back to what we were saying about startups, right? [52:42](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3162) Like, why do startups ever win at all? [52:43](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3163) **Scott Wu:** And if you do everything, you will lose to Microsoft or Google who does everything but also has like trillions of dollars, more resources and 100,000 more people than you, right? [52:51](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3171) And infinitely more brand name, right? And like the way that you build, you know, like a real kind of like, you know, a real like lasting business or lasting product is by really, really focusing and narrowing on one specific thing, making a very concentrated bet. And then obviously, you know, your bet has to end up being right. But like, you know, from there, it's like a lot of just like really tight execution. And so in software, you know, I love, you and I have talked about this. I love the quote from Daniel Eck in Spotify, right? People were saying, so like, you know, there's like YouTube's trying to go and do this and Apple has Apple Music and like, why should there be like a, he was like, you know, I can give you all the other reasons, but the truth is we're just going to care way more about music than they are. [53:35](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3215) And I think for us, it's true. It's like, we are just going to care so much more about like, what does it look like to build software end to end at Goldman Sachs or at like Mercedes-Benz or something like that, you know? And there's a lot of nuance in that. And there's like a lot of messiness in that, right? It's not as simple as like, oh, here's a sandbox algorithms problem. Go and code me the correct 30-line program that solves this problem or something. It's like, how do you work with all the messiness of the real world? How do you understand the code base as it exists today? How do you collaborate with all the humans on it? [54:05](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3245) How do you plug into their ticketing system? How do you give the agent the ability to test its own code and run everything locally? All of these are obviously super hairy, messy problems. And that's what we care a lot about. And so from that perspective, it's a very kind of nice, like, you know, the labs have their own products. I'm sure they'll continue to do more. But in practice, there are a lot of nice ways for us to cooperate. Obviously, like on top of that, like being the Switzerland means that, you know, folks can work with us and kind of like trust in us that we will kind of route them to the right models, that we will optimize the price performance for them, that we will kind of like direct them to the right use cases and so on. [54:40](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3280) Because, you know, we're not incentivized for them to spend more on the models either. You know, we're incentivized for them to get value and to get output out of it. I love that you use the example of the war between Spotify and the rest of the Apple Music, for example. Jimmy Iovine, who also came on the show and now is actually a friend of mine. He actually called me yesterday about this because anything, anytime anything happens with AI. music and Spotify calls me, but we talked about this because he's like, you don't understand, like he had like 40 years of experience in the music industry, had all the relationships. [55:07](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3307) He's like, Apple bought me for $3 billion. Spotify at the time, he's like, we're going to go head to head with them. Spotify only had 3 million paid subscribers at the time Jimmy's going to fight the war. And he's like, I have one of the biggest companies in the world. And then he talked about, he's like, that wind up being a huge, he thought it was an asset. It was a huge liability because they're like, we don't give a shit about getting a couple million more, tens of millions or more of subscribers. We invented the most successful consumer product of all time. And he said something like they just clipped his wings. [55:35](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3335) And he was like, he was trying to do something like, oh, this isn't important to us. Where Daniel was going to die if he was not successful. He just cared about a lot more. Dude, even in the two years that we've been around, you know, I've heard so many different versions of the same argument. Because when we started, as you can imagine, this was true for us. It was true for everybody in the space, building the space. the number one pushback that you would always hear from investors from other people it was like but like Microsoft already has GitHub Copilot like isn't that everybody's just going to use that right and it's like it's a very reasonable thing to say in some sense because you know they did have all they did own all of GitHub and they did have a partnership with OpenAI and they did have like VS Code and so on I think in practice the reality is there's so much more innovation and so much more to build that there was a lot of like positive you know Microsoft's like a great partner of ours and we do a lot of things together and we build even more together right And I think the reality is, like, people have said this forever, like, oh, like, yeah, like, startups versus, you know, like, why should, you can give all the rational arguments. [56:30](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3390) Ten years ago, it was like, Google will do this or Facebook will do this. Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's like, oh, why should Datadog exist or why should Snowflake or Databricks exist or whatever? You know, the clouds, the clouds have all of it. You know, the clouds care about observability, too. The clouds care. And the reality is, like, it's in some sense a bit of an uncreative way to think about things, I think. Like if there was like one thing that, okay, here's what we all know is going to be the end state future and everybody's just working toward it and whoever has the most resources toward it wins. [56:56](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3416) And of course, yeah, you know, it's like we know who has the most resources to it, right? But if there are millions of problems out there to solve, there's lots of different things. The world is dynamic. Things change all the time. There's lots of new ideas or opportunities or ways to build new products. Then the reality is like, of course, there's lots of different niches to own. There's different things to really bet on. There's different focuses to spend your time on. And I think that will continue. Yeah, I mean, I think it's like, for better or for worse, after the last couple months of news, you know, cognition, I think, has been a bit more of the like. [57:29](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3449) We've become a bit. more known as the folks betting on independence in some sense because obviously there have been some high-profile acquisitions. It's funny you said that because I wanted one of the questions I'm going to ask you, which you probably won't answer. It's like, how many different acquisition offers have you had? I will not answer that question. Dozens? More? Dozens is a lot, dude. I don't know about dozens. Good time. It's probably only a handful that could actually afford to buy you if you would sell, but the amount of times they keep coming back. Oh, I see. Well, yeah. Anyway, this independence part is really interesting to me. [58:03](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3483) We were on the phone, me, you, and a mutual friend on three-way, like, I don't know. I think it was actually last summer. And we're not going to say the company. But I was like, Scott, what do you think about, you know, an acquisition with X, not X the platform, X the blank company? And you're like, I don't know how we'd be able to afford them. You just assumed I meant you buying them. And I just fucking cracked up laughing. I was like, it's hilarious. No, so I think like, yeah, yeah. And it's like folks, like there are folks taking acquisitions and doing things. There's some big high profile ones. [58:41](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3521) I think those are great to be clear. And I think it's a very reasonable path for exit. As I mentioned for us, it's like we've all come into this, like we want to build a generational business. That's what we're really excited about. And I think people, I think today sometimes, I've seen some more of this nihilism where they say, oh, like, yeah, yeah, maybe it's just, maybe it's too late. Maybe it's not possible anymore. And like. What does that mean? What's not possible? Like maybe it's not possible to build a new independent business because everything else, you know, it's like. Because the labs are going to do everything. [59:06](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3546) Because all the opportunities take it, you know. And it's like, guys. Those people aren't founders. Founders are rationally optimistic. Yeah. They're just not founders. Yeah. They believe even there's no evidence that they should succeed. Yeah. That they will succeed. Yeah. So people like that just need to get a job. Dude, I'd say this even with Devin. But if you think that going onto the Devon web app or any other coding product out there today and giving the instructions the way that you do right now and then you get the pull request out and then that's how you review it and that's how you build software, if you think that that's going to be the way that software is built forever, then yeah, then nothing will change. [59:39](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3579) But I think we have 10 more generations of these different product experiences to come, right? And building those and doing those, it's like that is what innovation is. And that's what's going to happen. The advantage I have of reading for the last decade of all these biographies of physicists of entrepreneurs. You're studying somebody's life, but in many cases, if you were so successful, they wrote a book about your life. You usually, it's almost like It's like you get a minor in like new industry creation every single time. It's just like, we're too late. It's over. There's no more opportunity. [1:00:06](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3606) Yeah. And the way I thought about this was like the best definition of a business I ever heard actually came from Richard Branson, which says all businesses and idea that makes somebody else's life better. And if that's true, which I believe it is, then that means there's infinite opportunity in the future now and in the future, because there's infinite ways to make somebody else's life better. And that's all a business is. So this idea that's like we got to the end of history is just bullshit. Yeah. And, you know, I don't mean to push you on this, but, like, I am personally curious, though, because, like, I know you're already rich. [1:00:33](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3633) I don't think money is your North Star based on the conversations we've had in the past. But, like, there's got to be some crazy number somebody can throw at you where you're just like, fuck, I have to take this. Not really. I mean, it's, like, the, you know, people have asked me sometimes before. they've asked me like um okay but like really though would you guys like this is what i'm doing right now yeah and the way that i say it sometimes um is like we would sell if we thought it was the most ambitious thing to do it's kind of an oxymoron because obviously but but but you know it's like my genuine answer in the sense that like that's like what we care we care about you know it's it's like the i mean it's funny you talk about money like i i mean i don't even Dude, I don't have, like, I don't have a car. [1:01:19](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3679) You live in an apartment, I just realized. I have a restaurant apartment. Yeah, it's like, I don't know. I think, I like eating sushi. That's fun. Sushi doesn't cost that much. You can do that off of an engineer's salary as well. Just so you know, if this is true, like, then you are the type of entrepreneur that I find the most fascinating in the world. Because, like, when startup founders come to talk to me, it's just like, I don't give a shit about your startup. I, like, I ask the same question. It's like, is this your last business? Yeah. I asked Kareem from Ramp, that's before we did this deep partnership. [1:01:49](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3709) And it's just like, okay, you could sell it. Like the Zuck example, where they're like, why didn't you take a billion dollars? I think you own 25% of the company. You would have made $250 million. You're like 22. He's like, well, what would I do with the money? I would just start another social network. I kind of like the one I have. I just want to build shit anyways. So what do I do? And then the other element of this, which I think is almost tied into you, where it's like, I feel like you're just having a lot of fun. Like, even being around here, it's just like, there's, your company's weirder in the composition of the people because it's literally just all nerds. [1:02:22](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3742) Like, and I think you like, you know, and I mean, well, like, you know, like, there's usually a mixture of obviously the nerds and some of the other people. And like, you kind of built this like, almost like. Your social network is like now and— You're not allowed here if you're not a nerd, yeah. Yeah, it's like a physical manifestation of your social network, but like the way I would describe this is like— Okay, cool, cool. No, so my friends are also nerds. Yeah, I agree, I agree. I mean that in an obviously enduring way. No, no, that's great. I love that, yeah. But the people I'm most interested in is just like, there's no price, right? [1:02:48](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3768) Yeah. Like the example I use is, go ask Steve Jobs. I'll give you $2 trillion, but you can't work on Apple. Yeah. What the fuck do you think he would have said? Yeah, I agree. No! He's like, well, I want to work on Apple. That's what I want to do. There's a funny thing that I wanted to tie together, which I didn't find the opportunity until now, is you are currently the second wealthiest entrepreneur from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I don't know if you remember. We've talked about this. We've talked about this. Yeah, yeah. The first one. Chicken finger is a great business, but I'm a customer of that business as well. [1:03:19](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3799) The first one is Todd Graves. Yeah. Owns Raising Cane's. Yeah. I talked to him. He was on the show. Yeah. You tell him, you'll give $100 billion for your chicken finger empire. No, he's turned down, and I know this for a fact because I've talked about it, he's turned down crazy acquisitions offers. He's like, I don't care about, it's not the money. Yeah. No, I mean, for us, it's very like, again, it's not rational, but the way that I would describe it, it's like, I feel, and I think all of us do, like that it'd be one thing if we tried and we gave it our all and we just weren't good enough that'd be fine like it wouldn't be that dude I'd be I'd be salty with hell you know it wouldn't be fine but like but like it would be like it would be an outcome it would be like an outcome that I could live with you know but if we felt like you know we could have gone for it all we could have pushed harder and we did it like that I think it's like I just I don't think we would like live with ourselves in that outcome. [1:04:21](https://realalpha.app/v/PYobZzjW_ic/?t=3861) And that's like the, if you have me explain it, it's kind of circular, I don't know, but it's like, why are we so excited to do this? Why do we do, you know, it's like we want to achieve our potential and build what we were meant to build, you know? And maybe that's something and maybe that's nothing, but like you'd rather find out and see, you know? I think this idea of you have one life, go. Yeah. Is a perfect place to stand. Thanks for the time, Scott. Yeah, thanks for having me. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review and make sure you listen to my other podcast founders for almost a decade. I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.